Updating you about today’s news confirming long-ago warnings on the FM website

Summary: Among other services, the FM website warns you today about future dangers. Here we review two important news stories about matters often reported on the FM website. Please reading these stories, which describe potentially major trends. More importantly, please act on at least one of them. Information is useless if it provides only fodder for gossip and whining.

Another over-the-top graphic

Content

About our drugged military

About the US government and influential Americans illegally supporting terrorists

In the comments please suggest appropriate responses by citizens to these stories.

(1) About our drugged military

“A fog of drugs and war“, Los Angeles Times, 8 April 2012 — “More than 110,000 active-duty Army troops last year took antidepressants, sedatives and other prescription medications. Some see a link to aberrant behavior.”

“Prescription Drugs and the U.S. Military — The War…on Drugs“, Melody Petersen, Men’s Health magazine, current issue (undated) — “Our Military is fielding one of the most heavily medicated fighting forces in the history of war. Our soldiers aren’t just fighting our enemies, they’re often also fighting their prescriptions.”

8 thoughts on “Updating you about today’s news confirming long-ago warnings on the FM website”

And if all else fails, engage in the great American pasttime of the Power of Positive Thinking. Life can be depressing for real reasons and so what? It is surprising that the Military guys are on mood enhancing stuff? Ya don’t say ?

Just one more indication that, despite the optimism of FM, it is very likely too late to save the USA from its own government. Just how many people found no interest in prior reports and how many others didn’t car about very much eise and just kept on keeping on? Here’s an interesting analysis from an Alter Net posting: “10 Ways Our Democracy Is Crumbling Around Us“, By Les Leopold, 5 April 2012.

Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It, Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.

The coming years might test America more than anything in our past, including the Revolutionary and Civil wars. America might lose both what defines it and what we hold most dear: our Constitution, our vast wealth, and our role as global hegemon. This transition will be like a singularity in astrophysics, a point where the rules breakdown – and beyond which we cannot see.

Such trials appear throughout history. … The mark of a great people is the ability to carry on when all is lost, including hope. We can learn much from the Russian people’s behavior in WWII. I doubt we will fall into such peril. But no matter what happens, there is no cause for despair.

Our wealth is just things (“hardware”), an inheritance from past generations. What we lose we can work to replace. Our aspirations to global hegemony were revealed as a mirage in Vietnam and Iraq, lasting less than two generations after WWII.

Our culture is a collection of discordant ideas, mixing lofty and base elements in a manner despised by much of the world — a disgust easily understood by watching our TV shows and movies, or listening to some of our popular music.

Our Constitution is just an idea inherited from the founders. We created it, and its death will give us the experience to do better with the next version.

We are America. We are strong because of our ability to act together, to produce and follow leaders. We are strong due to our openness to other cultures and ability to assimilate their best aspects. We are strong due to our ability to adapt to new circumstances, to roll with defeat and carry on.

People, Ideas, and Hardware. “In that order!” the late Col John R. Boyd, USAF, would thunder at his audiences.

We will be what we want to be. The coming years will reveal what that is.

“There was a dream that was Rome. It shall be realized. These are the wishes of Marcus Aurelius.”
— Maximus Decimus Meridius, in the movie “Gladiator”

When I was in college studying psychology, my professors repeatedly warned me and the rest of their students that “correlation does not imply causation” — meaning that when researchers explore the potential relationship between two variables that are not subject to direct manipulation by the researchers, the direction of causality cannot be conclusively determined.

The problem with suggesting that aberrant behavior among people in the military might be attributed to psychotropic drugs lies in the fact that over the past few years, enlistment qualifications were — to put it politely — “expanded” (or to put it bluntly, lowered) in an attempt to help military recruiters meet their monthly quotas which they were having difficulty doing. One way in which these qualifications were lowered is that a prior history of “emotional problems” or even minor criminal convictions no longer disqualified a potential recruit from military service. Therefore, the possibility cannot be ruled out that at least some of the recruits and veterans currently taking psychotropic medication already had emotional problems before they entered the service — perhaps, in some cases, problems that had never been officially treated or diagnosed — but the pressures of war and combat amplified these problems and overtaxed whatever mechanisms and strategies they had previously been using in order to cope. “A Fog of Drugs and War” faintly alluded to this, but I feel the author could have done a lot more to emphasize this.

That being said, the possibility also can’t be ruled out that in some cases, the psychotropic drugs are only exacerbating rather than improving the situation. There’s no question that these drugs can be and have been of great benefit to some patients, but (contrary to the general expectations of the military) human beings are not uniform and there have been plenty of examples of patients prescribed one of these medications who either received no significant benefit from it or who actually experienced worse symptoms as a result.

To make matters worse, the military may have created a vicious circle by permitting people with a history of emotional disturbance to enlist in the military since it is well documented that the experience of combat even without the extra stress of guerrilla warfare takes a toll on people who are comparatively well-adjusted, never mind people who aren’t. This potentially creates recruits who are practically being set up to fail, ticking time bombs just waiting to be set off — allow people with a prior history of emotional problems to enlist, drop them in a stressful situation which is bound to make any emotional handicaps even worse, and then prescribe drugs which carry risks f their own!

Personally, I’ve had very mixed feelings for a long time now about the frequency with which psychotropic drugs are being prescribed in this country for the general population — let alone for people in the military. The problem as I see it is that in many cases, psychotropic drugs (when they’re effective) only treat symptoms — in some cases, merely by numbing the patient’s emotional and/or physical reactions — and do little or nothing to treat the underlying cause(s) of the patient’s condition. It often seems to me as if we’re slowly moving toward a “Brave New World” quick-fix scenario in which we simply medicate people into compliance and conformity with an increasingly sick and stagnant society instead of making an effort to change the conditions within the society creating the suffering which necessitates the drugs…but of course, if we did that, Big Pharma wouldn’t be raking in the big bucks for these drugs anymore.

It’s just a guess, but the experts cited in the LAT article and the various DoD studies I cited do not need to be reminded about lessons of freshman stats.

Indeed…but that being said, the experts are not the target audience for many of the articles which you cited for further information. Articles such as “A Fog of Drugs and War” which appear in publications such as Time, Men’s Health, The New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times are written for the benefit of the general population, the majority of whom probably never went to college and therefore probably never took statistics. I realize that these kinds of publications tend to favor articles which simplify the issues for the benefit of their readers (especially in these times when a growing number of Americans seem to be jettisoning knowledge in favor of ignorance and reason in favor of reaction) but the problem with simplifying an issue is that even when the writers and editors have the best intentions, sometimes vital pieces of information can be left out — and that’s assuming that corporate-owned publications such as the ones mentioned above have the best intentions, which is questionable.